Sessions

Presenter: Bill Anderson
Level: Intermediate

This session will build upon the first Chilkat presentation at Southwest Fox 2023. We'll go through an overview of what Chilkat does and how to harness the power and versatility in your application development. We'll discuss what's changed over those three years, the new syntax, the new classes (including AI!), and where the product is headed.

You will learn:

• How Chilkat/ChilkatVFP can greatly expand your development capabilities
• Demonstrations of Chilkat/ChilkatVFP in action
• Chilkat changes/updates/enhancements since the 2023 presentation

Prerequisites: None

Presenter: Doug Hennig
Level: Advanced

REST (Representational State Transfer) is a software architectural style that was created to describe the design and guide the development of the architecture for the internet. REST services have mostly supplanted SOAP and other older architectures and become a common mechanism for accessing APIs due to their simplicity, scalability, and flexibility. This session discusses how REST services work and presents a set of classes that make it relatively simple to consume REST services in VFP applications.

You will learn:

• How REST services work
• How to understand REST documentation
• How to use the BaseREST class to create service-specific subclasses
• How to handle authentication
• How to handle parameters

Prerequisites: Some knowledge of HTTP calls would be helpful but not necessary

Presenter: Irwin Alfredo Rodríguez
Level: Intermediate

What if an AI agent could inspect your running VFP application in real time, reading variables, querying cursors, analyzing forms, and calling your own business functions without you changing a single line of your existing architecture?

FoxAgent makes this possible. It is a runtime observability and AI integration platform built entirely with X# and .NET, designed specifically for existing Visual FoxPro applications. Through a lightweight COM bridge that VFP loads at startup, FoxAgent connects your application to Claude Desktop via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), giving AI agents live access to your system state.

In this session, you will see FoxAgent in action against a real VFP application: an AI agent navigating forms, reading business data, and executing domain-specific tools written in pure VFP. You will also learn how to create your own User Defined Tools (VFP classes that the system discovers automatically and exposes to the AI as callable functions) with zero configuration.

FoxAgent is built on X# 3.0 and .NET 10, but requires no .NET knowledge from the VFP developer. If you can write a VFP class, you can extend FoxAgent.

You will learn:

• How FoxAgent connects a live VFP application to an AI agent using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and X#/.NET as the bridge layer
• How to integrate FoxAgent into an existing VFP application with minimal code changes, no architectural modifications required
• How to create User Defined Tools (UDTs) in pure VFP that the AI agent discovers automatically and can call as functions
• How X# and .NET 10 can be used to build modern infrastructure (HTTP servers, Named Pipes, MCP hosts) that seamlessly extends VFP applications
• How AI agents can be used for runtime observability, remote diagnostics, and business automation in legacy VFP systems

Prerequisites: Basic familiarity with Visual FoxPro class syntax (DEFINE CLASS). No X# or .NET knowledge required.

Presenter: Rick Schummer
Level: All levels

Continuing my session "How VFPX Can Make You a Superhero!" from Southwest Fox 2024.

Various VFPX sessions at recent Southwest Fox and Virtual Fox Fest conferences have focused on the latest and greatest releases from the different projects. Doug Hennig and I have given numerous What's New in VFPX sessions over the years to showcase some of the newest projects released on the community's open-source juggernaut by dozens of developers around the world. Presenting and attending these sessions is one of the ways I keep up with their impact on me as a Visual FoxPro developer.

Tools that have complexity and sophisticated features and functionality like GoFish, Project Explorer, DataExplorer, Builders, IntelliSenseX, Upsizing Wizard, and Thor have had their own dedicated sessions showing you how the Visual FoxPro Interactive Development Environment (IDE) can be enhanced and improved. Other sessions have covered projects like Parallel Fox, ThemedControls, DynamicForms, VFP2C32, and XLSXWorkbook that help enhance and improve your end-users' applications.

But what about some of the older, established projects that may be more feature complete? What about those projects that have been around for a while, but are just as useful as any of the newer projects? There are even some projects that have a narrow but still useful feature or functionality that might assist you. Today we have access to more than 155 projects included in the VFPX open-source eco-system. The objective of this session is to cover some of the other projects that have not received a lot of attention over the years and to shed some light on projects I have used that have helped me either improve the VFP IDE or improve the code and features of our applications deployed to thousands of customers around the world.

You will learn:

• What other tools besides GoFish, Project Explorer, DataExplorer, Builders, IntelliSenseX, Upsizing Wizard, and Thor can improve the VFP IDE
• What other components besides Parallel Fox, ThemedControls, DynamicForms, VFP2C32, and XLSXWorkbook can improve the applications you develop

Prerequisites: An interest in improving your development experience or your customer's user experience.

Presenter: Rick Borup
Level: All levels

This session explores a collection of useful and fun third-party software utilities for developers. Some are free while others are not, and some may be well-known while others are not, but each deserves a mention and all deserve consideration for a place in your developer's toolbox. Come to this session to learn about cool tools you can use to improve your productivity as a VFP developer.

You will learn:

• Printing without a printer
• Text editors that understand VFP syntax
• Working with screenshots and images
• Working with files and the Windows file system
• Optimizing your desktop workspace
• Working from the command line
• Organizing, tracking, and prioritizing your projects
• Securely managing your passwords

Prerequisites: None

Presenter: Jeff Roberts
Level: Intermediate

Over the years, I've inherited many more FoxPro and Visual FoxPro applications than I have written from scratch. Early in my development, I relied on techniques published in books and on blogs by the giants who came before me. For the last couple of years, I've been on a deep dive into AI tools, specifically running a lot of experiments to see how far I can push them to extract business logic, architecture, and other concepts that are sometimes difficult to understand and often hidden in large Visual FoxPro applications. In this session, I outline my day-to-day methods for using AI, as well as specifics on generating documentation for an existing VFP project you've inherited.

You will learn:

• General AI advice for getting things done quickly and keeping the AI on track
• How to generate meaningful documentation for a large legacy project with the help of AI
• How to use this documentation yourself, or hand it off to AI, for troubleshooting, debugging, refactoring, and adding new features

Prerequisites: None

Presenter: John Ryan
Level: All levels

This session covers interesting techniques to keep applications in sync with current standards. Most of the techniques are easily implemented without the need to rewrite whole sections of code. I plan to start with modern authentication and proceed through as many in the following list as time allows. The planned sequence is:

• Authentication in 2026: Many of us wrote our own app sign-in routines over the years, but this topic is a refresher on optional authentication against Windows Active Directory or Microsoft Entra ID. The topic starts with samples using Windows AD API and LDAP authentication against a Linux or Windows Server, followed by OAuth2 (single sign-in) authentication against Entra ID. For OAuth2, an Entra account will be configured to handle the authentication, including required settings that can trip you up. Sample VFP code is then used to interface via OAuth2. Examples include a demo website and a VFP Windows application (which is trickier).
• 2-Factor Authentication: A refresher on 2FA from a previous session, this time using a Microsoft or Google Authenticator App. Code samples are provided that never "phone home", working perfectly even if the user's machine is offline.
• Interesting VFPA Settings: these are are easily added to your main program, for considerable benefit. For example: did you ever wish that VFP crash dialogs or other exceptions allowed you to override the generic dialog title? Newer versions of VFPA do allow this. Newer versions also allow you to augment the VFP SYS(2450,1) function so it actually does what most of us thought it was doing all along (looking in your app for PRG/UDF before searching the file path). This topic covers useful VFPA SYS() settings you can easily add to your work.
• Unable to write to file: on newer versions of Windows, VFP and other apps can encounter brief read-only states that cause an error, but the file is available immediately afterwards. VFPA optionally can keep trying to create or write to the file if this happens. Relevant settings are covered briefly.
• Moving to 64-bit: VFPA allows seamless code transformation, but if you are using FLLs or third-party DLLs, you need a 64-bit alternative or your app will not run. This topic covers encryption/decryption that works identically in 32-bit or 64-bit if you rely on SPS VFPEncryption.fll and confirms that 64-bit apps can still perform automation against 32-bit Office, apart from one gotcha.
• Windows App Anti-Hacking refresher: depending on available time, DLL hijacking/injection and how to prevent it will be covered as well as other defensive development. Examples include proven VFP techniques to prevent SQL Injection, ensuring NULL doesn't break your conditional code, and sanitizing user input before displaying on a web page.

You will learn:

• How to add Windows or OAuth2 authentication into existing sign-in modules
• 2-Factor Authentication: easily achieved in VFP, without any "phoning home"
• VFPA settings that overcome certain issues
• 64-bit development: things that won't work unless you have alternatives
• Antihacking refresher: easy ways to harden your app

Prerequisites: None

Presenter: Christof Wollenhaupt
Level: Intermediate, Advanced

Most migrations to a new SQL Server-based system go like this: A new system with a brand new database structure is developed. Once the new system approaches finalization, all data from the previous system is imported. Performance goes way down. Performance problems are frantically fixed. Project is rolled out. Users start working on the system. Performance goes way down.

Microsoft SQL Server has two separate performance bottlenecks: the amount of data that needs to be processed and what data needs to be accessed concurrently. The former is well-understood by most developers and supported by query optimization tools. Concurrency, on the other hand, is much harder to test and less obvious to most.

In this session, we deep dive into several aspects of SQL Server. The first one is locking which includes locking hierarchies, lock compatibility, isolation levels, and lock escalation. Next we look at the structure of a SQL Server database, how data is actually stored, and how the reader and writer processes work. This will lead us to the role of the transaction log, its structure, its purpose, and the ever-repeating question why the log file isn't shrinking.

You will learn:

• Where to look for bottlenecks
• What those index options mean
• How locks and hints really work
• How to diagnose concurrency and storage problems

Prerequisites: None

Presenter: Gregory Green
Level: All levels

I wrote several tools for editing VFP forms, classes, menus, tables, and program files. I also wrote global search, comparison, table browse, and library tools. These are all APP files that run inside the VFP design-time environment (IDE). To integrate them I wrote a replacement for the PJX file and associated project manager and a toolbar used in the VFP IDE to make it easier to access these tools. These tools are available at GitHub.

Somes of the features included are:

• IntelliSense
• Code insert, refactoring, and Win32 DECLARE DLL insert
• Bookmarking (similar to Eclipse)
• Code tips, completion, and help
• Code comparison and copy buffers for code snippets
• Goto definition, Where used, and Quick search
• Code peek
• Line numbers
• Hot keys
• Highlight mode for current line, undeclared variables, and current selection
• Beautify code
• MemberData edit and extension of MemberData beyond the VFP limit
• Macro recording and execution
• Enhanced property editor; add properties/methods from another form or visual class
• Enhanced printing
• Jump to matching code blocks, go to line, navigation to previous cursor position
• Compile errors are shown in a list with hyperlink to the code line with the error

This sessions looks at these tools and how to use them to develop VFP applications.

You will learn:

• What VFP alternative editors are available
• Features of the editors to enhance coding
• Limitations of the editors
• Source code of the editors for additional expansion of features

Prerequisites: VFP 9 experience